Butterflies and Wine

April 2010

The first time that Courtney* and I hung out together outside of a class-related activity was in her dorm room. I brought the wine. She wasn’t sure how to work the corkscrew, so I offered to do it, but my hands were shaking, and I felt my face turning red as I struggled to pull the cork from the bottle. We were hanging out under the guise of a new friendship, but my feelings for her extended beyond friends, and I had hoped that tonight would give me a clue as to whether she felt the same way. Courtney’s suite was across the quad from mine; so close, in fact, that I could see in to my suite’s common room from her window. From time to time earlier that semester, I would glance out my dorm room window and see her practicing yoga on the massive concrete steps leading up to another section of dorms. She was skilled at lotus, and I remember vividly that her back was always very, very straight during her poses. This fact of her posture did not escape me as I sat behind her in class (Sexuality Studies, no lie). I reveled at her ability to sit so straight and poised for a full hour and 15 minutes of class. I admired her for it, and the simple fact of her posture elevated her in my mind. She was an enigma to me, so I took each piece of observation, however small, to add to my knowledge of her. In class, she was mostly quiet but articulate when she did choose to speak. I felt tongue-tied and unknowledgeable in comparison. There was many a day when I zoned out from the lecture and instead sat staring at her short curly brown hair; I longed to run my fingers through it, just to see what it felt like…only if she wanted me to, of course. But I digress.

It was April and still cool enough for the window to be open. The breeze gave me some precious fresh air that helped to calm my nerves. Courtney and I sat next to each other, cross-legged on the couch, drinking the wine and exchanging stories. For two people who had studied together and sat in class together for nearly a full semester, we still had much to learn about each other. We talked about the scars we had on our hands and used it as an excuse to trace each other’s skin. I showed her the burn scar on my right thumb that I earned earlier that year while making some (less than stellar) brownies. She grazed the top of my thumb with hers. Time stopped. That eschewed cliché was completely and totally accurate. Did she know the effect that she had on me? I felt myself blushing continuously throughout the night. I convinced myself that it wasn’t obvious. Later in our relationship, Courtney would tell me that she had noticed and thought it was adorable.

Tracing each other’s skin on our hands was the closest we came to acknowledging our feelings for one another (or to making a move) that night. The waiting was agonizing but also exhilarating. Before I left that night, she gave me a tour of the rest of her suite. The highlight of the tour for me, unsurprisingly, was her bedroom. Courtney was working on her senior thesis at the time, and she had stacks of books on her nightstand and all along the windowsill. I loved seeing the inner workings of her life, where she did the bulk of her thinking. She was still an enigma to me, and seeing her room was like earning one more piece of the puzzle. I still remember the jolt I felt when I saw her bed. Her bed was slightly messy, the sheets carelessly pulled up and still somewhat rumpled. Staring at her bed hit me hard. I couldn’t help but imagine her in there, and then I would snuggle in beside her. Soon, I thought. Soon, it’ll happen.

The first one

Fall 2009

We were watching the L Word, snuggled up in her dorm room bed and discussing our favorite characters (her: Jenny; me: Dana). When the episode ended, she turned to me and said she wanted to ask me something. She seemed serious, and I got nervous. Maggie* was the very first girl I had kissed, the very first girl I had dated. She was gorgeous and sexy. Femme with a touch of edginess. This combination made her a safe choice for a lot of bi-curious girls to test out their same-sex attraction. It also led to a lot of heartache and confusion for Maggie. She told me she didn’t want what we had to turn out the same way.

“So, which is it?” she asked. “Do you like me because of me or because I’m a woman?”

I froze. I didn’t expect this conversation. And I didn’t know the answer. Everything was still so new to me. I was figuring out who I was, what I liked, and who I wanted to be. I was honest with her.

“I…I don’t know,” I said reluctantly. “I think it’s a little bit of both.”

Wrong answer, apparently. Or, maybe a little too honest. She didn’t want to be used. I didn’t think that I was using her. I told her that I liked her. A lot. Which was so true. But I didn’t know what I wanted enough to know what I was doing. I felt like a hormonal teenage boy. I thought about her constantly. I couldn’t focus on my classes. I smelled her perfume everywhere. Shit. How did anyone get anything done feeling like this?

And then I got my first taste of heartbreak. After that dreaded conversation, Maggie started drifting away, not returning my texts as quickly and then eventually not at all. A few weeks later, I finally ran into her at the on-campus student restaurant when she was meeting up with one of my other friends. I walked up close, loosely grabbed her shirt, and leaned in to ask her where she’d been. I was trying to be flirty, but being that close to her again just made me sad. I knew that we were done, despite her inability to be direct with me.

And so began my angsty period of Tegan and Sara. First loves rarely turn out well, but in this case, it led to a whole new genre of music. And for that, I will always be grateful to Maggie.

I knew I was gay when...(Part 4)

So, after those experiences and confusion, what would make me actually consider how I was feeling and who I might be, you ask? One person. Leah Mitchell*. Fast forward 4 years. It’s Spring 2009, and I’m a junior in college. Nearly all my friends were abroad, so it was a weird semester to begin with. Leah was in a class I was taking, and we had some mutual friends but didn’t actually know each other. I did, however, know she was gay. And that fact alone made me blush just by looking at her. But for whatever reason, and I’ll never know whether it was just the right time or that Leah was the right person for me to have a crush on at the time, I NOTICED Leah. And, all of a sudden, it was like, holy shit. I can’t stop thinking about this person. And, like a cheesy cliché, I started understanding all the love songs and the feelings and the crazy distracting thoughts I had about her. And the worst part? I had no one to tell! But I finally admitted to myself that shit was getting real. I spent nearly every night that semester listening to the same song and just thinking about her with terrible knots in my stomach. I couldn’t ignore how I felt about Leah. And maybe that was okay. And so began my more public coming out process, which is ongoing to this day, but whose isn’t? I never was actually with Leah, but it didn’t matter. She was my gate. For whatever reason, she was the one who made me feel like I could be gay.

I wish I could say that once I accepted my gayness, I was not awkward and asked Leah out, but that would be a total and complete lie. I was awkward as fuck. That April, my school hosted a campus-wide gay pride event. Some club had the a whole rainbow spread of different colored jello, and all I wanted was some of this jello. I realize that this sounds like a metaphor, but I’m talking about actual literal JELLO. I was so focused on this goddamn bright jello that I didn’t even notice who was running the table. As I approached the table and finally looked up, I saw that Leah was one of the people in charge. I literally stopped in my tracks and did a complete turn around and hustled away. I didn’t look back once, and I could feel my face turning red. I needed to get myself under control and fast.

I never ended up even kissing Leah, but by the time finals were over, I had actually worked up the nerve to have a conversation with her and that was enough to make me feel like I was literally floating. The conversation was utter small talk about one of our reading assignments for class, but the fact that she engaged with me at all and then SMILED on top of that was more than I would have ever expected. She graduated that spring, and I went home to a summer of The L Word and faced with the prospect of coming out to my family.**

The good stuff doesn’t come until I started my senior year of college. I came back to school SO SO ready to finally make out with an actual woman. Although my crush on Dana Fairbanks (Why, Ilene Chaiken? WHY?!) had sustained me over the summer, it would no longer do. And then, a mere two weeks into the semester, I found myself hanging out with a friend of my best friend’s. And you guys, she wasn’t wearing a bra, and I could totally tell. I was completely beside myself.  Not only was this girl super hot and smart, she was ACTUALLY gay. Trifecta! By the end of the night, it was just the two of us watching some tv show that neither of us actually cared about. ALL I could focus on was the fact that our arms were just barely touching, and holy shit, the electricity! When she finally kissed me, it was like validating everything I had been feeling for the last eight years. I felt all the feelings and was totally, at least for those moments, complete.

We didn’t work out. Turns out we didn’t actually have all that much in common, but all that doesn’t matter now. Because now, 12 years after I seriously started noticing my homo feelings, I’m with an amazing woman who makes me feel all the feelings all the time. I feel validated and like those 12 years packed with emotional ups and downs were not in vain.


**To be followed up in a separate post.

I knew I was gay when... (Part 3)

March 2005: But the feelings kept coming back. One morning when I was almost 17, I woke up feeling odd. It was a feeling I’d had before, but like last time, I was unable to place it. But as I remembered the dream I had the night before, the description for how I felt also came to me. Ashamed.

I had dreamt about kissing another girl, and not just any girl, a good friend of mine. In the latest dream, we had been cuddling. We had hung out the night before, and the dream started out in the same way. We had been huddled together to protect each other from the horror movie we were watching—I’ll admit it. I had some moves even back then. Being so close to her felt good, and I remember not wanting it to stop both in real life and the dream. But then the dream quickly progressed beyond the events of the previous night.  In the dream, we had been cuddling and, suddenly, kissing, in that way only dreams allow, without a clear sequence of events. No leaning in, no talking. Just cuddling, then kissing. Good kissing. Kissing that made me feel that peculiar feeling in my stomach when I woke up. I remember feeling panicky and trying to calm myself down. Why the hell was I dreaming about kissing girls? Was that normal? Maybe it was just my way of expressing platonic affection for my friend? I rationalized the shit out of this dream.

During this time I often turned to a dream I once had where I kissed a boy from my math class. It was my proof that I was Straight with a capital S. After all, there was no such thing as sometimes wanting to kiss boys AND girls. Actually, I think the thought that I was maybe bisexual gradually slipped into my consciousness, but I wasn’t even ready to handle that. Instead, whenever I doubted or questioned my attraction to boys or girls, I returned to that one dream. I held onto it like a life raft. And yet, my dreams with sexual undertones (or, let’s be real, overtones) featuring other girls far outnumbered my dreams where I kissed boys. 

August 2005: I was about to start my senior year of high school, and I was feeling pretty damn good about life. I had my friends, my car, and a new sense of freedom that came with being the oldest in the school. To top it off, I was dating a boy. Take that, gay thoughts! One night, before I inevitably broke up with him, we were watching a movie and snuggling in his basement. I use the word snuggling loosely. We were barely touching due to my vigilance and his timidness. Also, the fact that his multiple brothers were stomping up and down the basement stairs the whole night didn’t help the situation. But despite the barely-counts-as-snuggling, I remember that my heart was beating faster than usual and I was a little nervous. And here’s the thing, here’s how I know I was trying SO hard to be straight: even at that point in the night, I was still wondering whether I was nervous because I wanted Jake* to kiss me or because I was terrified that he would.

The night wore on and neither one of us made a move. I was both disappointed and relieved and confused. I was feeling all the feelings, guys! I wanted to have a boyfriend, because it secured my place in my heteronormative world. Talk about the majority culture ramming norms down people’s throats.

He finally kissed me after walking me to my car. I smiled and said good night, but as I got in my car and drove away, I was devastated. I think I had thought that Jake’s kiss would be a make it or break it situation. And it was break it, for sure. I felt trapped, confused, and utter dread in the pit of my stomach. I even calculated how long I could date him before it would be socially appropriate to break up with him. I wanted more than anything to feel attached to him, to want to be with him, but instead I just felt completely alone.

I knew I was gay when... (Part 2)

Fall 2004:  Three years later, and I was still experiencing weird emotions that seemed beyond the typical spectrum of adolescent angst. I had absolutely denied myself the option to explore my feelings and had instead worked on suppressing and separating that seemingly traitorous part of myself. At night, I would ask to be attracted to boys in my prayers. Despite my conversation with myself at 13, I had done this every night since then. I wasn’t even religious, so praying to God meant I was desperate.

These weird emotions began to take a toll on me. I did my best to cover it up with my friends, school, and softball. But it lingered. And so, occasionally, I would try to explore what my feelings could potentially mean, casually of course. I grasped on to any indication that my feelings, none of which my friends seemed to be experiencing, were common for teenage girls. I would secretly take quizzes in magazines that declared “Could you be gay? Take this quiz to find out!”

It was a strange dichotomy that I lived. I felt equally strongly about the possibility that I could be gay and also what I thought to be the more likely reality that there was no way I was. I was so afraid of rejection from everyone and everything around me that I always kept my mask in place.

By the time I was 16, I was painfully aware of the fact that I had yet to feel butterflies again for anyone, let alone a boy (why this was such an important indicator for me, I’ll never know). On the one hand, it was great. No butterflies for girls meant that I wasn’t gay! On the other hand, I was worried that I wasn’t experiencing anything.

Of course, I had crushes on boys, which I knew was expected  of me. I found these crushes to be utterly exhausting at first. So much faked enthusiasm, but after a while I got the hang of it. The crushes fell into a pattern. I would flirt with him in school or over AIM, no problem, but the next step was always too daunting for me. Whenever I got too close to actually dating a boy, I became totally anxious and closed off. Quite the opposite of butterflies, I had a pit of dread in my stomach whenever I had to go on a date, which was admittedly rare. I was pretty good at shutting things down.

Gradually, those feelings of dread disappeared and were replaced with numbness, which I accepted as a welcome alternative. Numbness was not ideal, but it was preferable to overwhelming anxiety and fear. Numbness made it easier for me to fake fitting in with the social norm.

Looking back, these conclusions I drew seem dramatic, but I resigned myself to these feelings of numbness for the rest of my life. I was not ready to admit to possibly being gay, so I relied instead on the idea that maybe there was just something wrong with me. Nonetheless, I figured I would still get married to a man, have kids, and just never be truly happy. I honestly didn’t know that I had an alternative (again, NO Emily Fields and Paige McCullers with their puffy drapes and shared future). I couldn’t make myself picture a different future. Sometimes I thought about being alone for the rest of my life. I’m not sure which vision was worse, because I knew it wasn’t what I really wanted. I accepted this outcome reluctantly but usually comforted myself by pushing away the future and my feelings. Nothing to worry about…yet. 

I knew I was gay when... (Part 1)

As a 25 year old looking back on my pre-teen and teen years, I see so many signs and indications that I was already a big fan of other girls, that it’s hard to believe that I stayed closeted until I was nearly 21. Despite my obsession with Mandy Moore—and I mean complete and utter infatuation, like trolled her website so often that I muted the background music so my parents wouldn’t know the depths of my admiration—and my love of cuddling my girl friends during scary movies and my utter lack of understanding when my kinda-sorta high school boyfriend wanted to hang out more than one day a week, I was adamant that I was a straight girl. I denied all other evidence to the contrary. And as I’ve mentioned, the evidence was plentiful.

My girlfriend and I are recently engaged--I guess I should call her my fiance(!). We're getting settled in to our semi-adult lives (we’re both in grad school, so semi- feels appropriate). While I was in a contemplative mood last week, I thought about some of my experiences as a closeted and confused teenager and how much I’ve learned about myself since coming out in 2009. I call myself closeted, although I recognize that I wasn’t closeted in the typical sense. That is, I didn’t identify as gay in high school and keep it a secret. Instead, I strongly pushed my other-than-hetero feelings deep down and refused to acknowledge them even though a part of me knew that they existed. I went to high school in the early to mid-2000s in the Northeast, not exactly the Stone Age or the conservative Bible Belt, but there were no shows like Glee or characters like Emily Fields (a tragedy for us all). The only lesbian I knew about in real life was an old friend of my mom’s, and I had never even met her. Forget a lesbian who was my age—that was the stuff of fantasies, so I compartmentalized and suppressed. Gay was not me. I was not gay.

But, of course, our true selves have a pesky habit of surfacing, especially when we don’t want to see them; so, on to that plentiful evidence. The following memories about my younger self stand out most vividly to me. They mostly reflect the utter lack of knowledge I had about being gay and also how thoroughly anxious and upset I was. I share these with the hope and intention that people will be able to relate to them, laugh about them, or maybe just feel less alone.

Summer 2001: It was my first summer as a teenager, and I spent it making out with girls. Um, no. Not really. Even for me, it would have been too hard to play that game of denial. Actually, I was at the end of season softball pool party—yeah, yeah, cue the stereotypical lesbian jokes here—at my teammate Katie’s* house. But Katie wasn’t just a teammate; to me, she was a goddess. I hung on her every word during the whole season. I craved her attention and felt that I could be around her all the time and never tire of her, you know, the usual love at first sight sort of thing. Unsurprisingly, this sort of seemingly harmless infatuation had happened to me before, a few times in fact, so I didn’t think it was strange. Surely all of my friends experienced this with their female friends, too?

At this particular party, I remember sitting next to Katie and at one point leaning in closer to her as she pointed something out in a magazine. As soon as I got closer to her, it was unmistakable. Butterflies in my stomach. I had never before experienced butterflies, had only read and heard about them. I definitely never felt any while I was around any boys. As an over-analyzer, I was convinced that these butterflies were symbolic of something very bad.

I was terrified.

I did my very best to push them far far away until I got home that night and faced myself in the mirror. I proceeded to talk myself out of liking girls. No, I told myself simply. Liking Katie, liking girls, is NOT an option. Forget about it. And then, as dorky as it sounds, I nodded to myself, like I was making it official. I made myself try to forget about Katie and my butterflies, which was easy enough to do because she started high school that year, and I was still in middle school. Apparently, it was as easy as that. At least for a little while.

Around this same time, I discovered the movie Lost and Delirious. It would play on HBO randomly, and I would sneak away to my parents’ room whenever I could to see when it would be on. My parents’ room was the only place in the house with HBO and privacy.  At the time, I couldn’t say exactly why I felt like I needed privacy, but all I knew was that I’d be super embarrassed if someone caught me watching it. Gay by association or something like that. It was as if whoever caught me watching it would be able to read on my face who I really was. They’d be able to tell that I liked watching the two girls kiss. And that simple fact made me unlike anyone else I knew.